Category: writing

And writers

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ice shock mgharris websites

Pre-packaged Christmas blog

For the second time it strikes me that I’ve been Doing Blogging All Wrong.

Over at Litopia, the writer’s community run by my literary agent, they put out a daily podcast. I actually believed people were insane dedicated enough to get up early to record this every morning.

But no. Turns out that this is what my agent does with his Sunday afternoons, then preps all the podcasts for a neat daily publication schedule. That way he can put something out every day without actually going mad.

So too the 12 Days Of Christmas feature over at literary magazine The View From Here, was prepped in advance and is now lined up to appear on a schedule over Christmas.

My own article appears on the second day of Christmas. As in – today!

At least it will be – when you read this.

(Btw readers who voted for me to post clues about ICE SHOCK might want to take a look. I give away a juicy bit of plot-line on this article…)

Lightbulb moment. You’d think that I would have cottoned on to the idea from our work developing the ARG that will be co-launched with ICE SHOCK. One of the websites has over 60 blog entries scheduled to appear over a month. We’re hoping that people will become hopelessly addicted and be checking the site every hour or so for updates as the story unfolds. It’s a thriller, so the pace hots up towards the end.

Yet it’s never occurred to me to do this with my own blog.

Until this post, everything you read has been published right away. No planning, just feel-think-write-publish.

There’s glory for you.

I received a brilliant fan letter recently. A boy from Colchester who said lovely things about INVISIBLE CITY and then said he was looking forward to my next book. He then described what he wanted my next book to be about – in quite some detail! Enough detail that I would probably be in trouble if I wrote exactly that plot. I think I’ll write back and suggest he writes up his idea himself. It sounded fab. People stranded on an island and at the mercy of flesh-eating zombies. Cool huh?

Apart from that, I’m having a very Christmassy Christmas, lots of carol singing and advent services and relatives and friends. Today we sampled various bloatation aids – cream tea in Burford, fish and chips, mince pies and mulled wine. And lemon, strawberry and blackcurrant bonbons from an old-fashioned sweet shop.

By the time this post appears I will be a BLIMP.

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appearances writers

Heinstein and Friends

Oxford-based radio presenter Bill Heine has his first book out – ‘Heinstein of the Airwaves’. It’s a set of recollections of his years working for BBC Radio Oxford during which he came to see a very different side to Oxford.

Not the Oxford of ‘dreaming spires’ and Inspector Morse and scientific endeavour, but the Oxford of ordinary people and troubled estates and corrupt publishers (Robert Maxwell)…the real Oxford.

I love this book and read most of it in one sitting soon after buying it at the wonderful launch party in the Ashmolean Museum. Of course I turned straight to the one story in which I had participated – the story of how Bill Heine and author Brian Aldiss incurred the wrath of Stanley Kubrick when they tried to show the then-banned film ‘A Clockwork Orange’ at Bill’s movie house, The Penultimate Picture Palace.

That night, I was in the audience, having queued for ages for the free showing of this notorious film. I’d read the novel by Anthony Burgess and was keen to see it on screen. When Brian Aldiss came forward and explained to the gathered audience that Kubrick had sent ‘people’ and an injunction to stop the show, I got up to leave. I’d queued for ages next to and was now sitting beside a quietly spoken young guy who’d told me that he’d watched the film 57 times. He loved Alex, he told me with tears in his eyes. “I feel so sorry for him when he’s being tortured…”

If you know the story of Clockwork Orange, you might understand why this kinda worried me. So, I declined Bill Heine’s offer to the audience that they could stay and watch ‘Doctor Strangelove’.

Bill Heine invited me to co-host his radio show the week that ‘Invisible City’ was launched. Here’s a 3-minute excerpt of the show.

There was a second event to launch ‘Heinstein of the Airwaves’ last week, at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. Bill invited four authors to talk about their books, updating him or retelling stories that he’d coaxed out of them on his radio show. So I shared a platform with adult authors for the first time; Brian Aldiss, Moazzam Beg and Mark Lynas. They told their stories before me; seriously dramatic stuff about dealing with Stanley Kubrick, being unjustly arrested and imprisoned for years in Guantanamo Bay, and almost dying of altitude sickness on a melting glacier (respectively!).

I wasn’t sure how I was going to come across after all that. But light relief and a sneak peek at the beginning of Josh’s journey actually went down very well! And what with Christmas coming up and granddaughters and godchildren and nieces and nephews to consider…we sold lots of copies of ‘Invisible City’!

It made a change for me to be signing copies for adults! Children don’t usually stay to chat…I guess they are shy? But that night at Blackwell’s I was kept very busy and met many interesting new people, including children’s authors and the organisers of Oxford’s new Jazz Festival…who invited me to their launch party! (click on the link to see photos.)

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writing

The writing process

Something you don’t often get from me today…a post about how I write.

I don’t write about this much because my agent strictly forbade me to tell people ‘how I write’. “Do not cast light upon the magic”, were his words.

Ha! But he doesn’t look at my blog often and he’s away on holiday right now so I reckon we’re probably safe.

I’ve been thinking a good deal about this recently because believe it or not, I never quite believe that I know what I’m doing.  That’s with four sold manuscripts under my belt; I still wonder if one day I’ll wake up and realise I have no clue how to write a novel.

About ten years ago I tried my hand at writing, using fan fiction as my literary gym. And at that time I thought that I couldn’t imagine anything scarier than looking at the blank screen and knowing that unless I could reliably produce hundreds of words of quality creative writing, day after day – I wouldn’t earn.

Well truthfully, that feeling hasn’t entirely left me.

But I suspect that a certain amount of fear and anxiety make for good fiction writing. You don’t want to be paralyzed but a state of emotional ambiguity, in my experience, is a good place from which to write.

It could be the types of stories I write. In most things I’ve written so far the protagonist is under extreme emotional and often physical pressure. They aren’t happy. They are troubled, anxious, scared.

I’ve been anxious lately and I’m not entirely sure why. The signs are there…waking up in the middle of the night feeling tearful, remembering things I’d rather not remember. Disturbing dreams that I can’t quite recall on waking. Wandering around and seeing the ‘what if’? (it’s like having a Dead Zone-type ability – you keep getting flashes of what-if, giving a momentary peek into an alternative future based on a slightly different outcome of apparently trivial things. Very useful for a writer!)

If I weren’t a writer I would deal with this anxiety in other ways. Talk to people. Go salsa dancing more. Work harder so as not to think about it.

But being a writer, there’s a detached part of my brain. It logs my hypersensitive state and metaphorically rubs its hands. Time to write; it says. Use this.

I could refer to this as my inner writing bitch but it doesn’t feel very female. It’s cold and ruthless and will happily watch me suffer the dredging up of memories and feelings in order to get the result.

I blame my agent for unleashing this scary and until-now-dormant part of my psyche. It’s like some evil dragon that he awakened after a very long sleep. It’s quite merciless and I’m afraid there are times when I’m prone to fall into its power. Right now there’s no shutting it up.

If you’re an aspiring fiction writer reading this and smiling…it’s no joke. To become a full-time fiction author is to enter a world from which I fear there is no return. You inhabit a landscape that is only partly real. The fictions you create slowly lead you away from reality. You may think that the real world is horrible enough but it can at least be quotidien and trivial and diverting. The fictional world where a writer increasingly spends their time cannot be any of those things. It must be deep and troubling and full of emotional resonance.

I wasn’t warned; I had no idea. I thought I could write purely frothy adventures that came nowhere close to troubling me. I knew that many authors are crazy but I assumed that was vanity, poverty, ego.

It simply never occurred to me that it was a consequence of living between two worlds.

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ice shock writing

I found Josh’s ‘voice’ in the beginning of ICE SHOCK

You hear a lot about writers finding their ‘voice’ or the voice of their narrator.

It can take a while.

I found Josh’s voice in the first draft of a manuscript I was calling THE FIFTH CODEX. It was to have been the second book of the series.

(Yes indeed. Imagine – in the original drafts I didn’t even let the hero find the codex in book 1 – he only found the city. And book 2 was finally going to address the mystery of the lost codex…and why a famous British Mayan archaeologist apparently suppressed the process of deciphering the Mayan script.)

So I’d written this manuscript: Todd Garcia, Boy Archaeologist.  It was sitting in the offices of a few literary agencies and two publishers. I was waiting to hear (the answer from all would be ‘no thanks’.) And I got to thinking that I wished I’d made young Todd a bit more sensitive. He was a pretty confident, feisty guy. Things didn’t get him down; he took on the world of puzzles with confidence. His world was much safer, much cosier than Josh’s.

So I wrote this blog entry, imagining a troubling dream the boy might have had. (There’s something else to tell about that dream…but that can wait until ICE SHOCK is published.)

And that was it – Josh walked out from those pages, almost fully formed.

When the agent who took me on told me he wanted a complete rewrite with a more vulnerable main character, I knew exactly where to find him…

That chapter has become the first blog entry in ICE SHOCK. When you read it, if you do, remember that in many ways, that’s where Josh was conceived.

The blog entry is called ‘Blue In Green’. I wrote it whilst listening to the Miles Davis track from ‘Kind of Blue’. The YouTube video is some old footage of the Bill Evans Trio playing ‘Blue In Green’.

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ice shock mgharris websites

Help me to decide what to blog pre-ICE SHOCK

Check out the poll on the right-hand sidebar – you can help me decide what to poll in the run-up to the publication of ICE SHOCK (March 2nd).

My life in the next few months will consist mainly of:

1. Doing my bit in developing and testing the ARG (it has a name but right now I’m not telling…)

2. A few school visits (so far four scheduled for Jan and Feb)

3. Getting involved in pre-launch publicity -don’t know exactly what yet, my agent and I will be having a meeting with Scholastic’s publicity team to brainstorm ideas.

4. Meeting my new editor and getting thoughts started re the edit of ZERO MOMENT

It’s three-and-a-half months to go, but I sense that time will pass quickly.

OK so, in that time, what would you guys like me to blog about? If the above four things plus the usual randomness is enough, go for choice #5.

Oh and…you can pick TWO things from the list.